Mademoiselle

Four Young Poets

By Corinne Robins

Two events shook the concept of the poet as the impractical, unimportant figure of our time--the holocaust of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in the twenties and the drama and death of Dylan Thomas that rated the Times editorial in the fifties. For a moment, the poet seemed to count as a twentieth-century man. But the picture of Don Quixote flourishing his long sword at the armored tank persists. And the new nearness and reality of the moon promises the destruction of one of poetry's last domains. Yet, in spite of all this, young poets continue to write and publish wherever they can--to persue and sweat for the 'concordance of word with sound: the verbal music." Today, they are swelling the ranks of the sound-deafened beat generation and building make-shift nests in the sacrosanct ivied schoolyards.

The courage and dedication it takes to be a great poet deserve respect, but Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Howard Hart and Kathleen Fraser also have outstanding talent. And, without talent to feed and tend, courage and perserverance are useless and even a little absurd.

As Sylvia Plath says, despite labels like 'cloistered' and 'academic,' the poet must live and 'oddly enough keep in beef stews and rainproof attics while writing his poems.' For Sylvia and her husband, Ted, the universities have been a sometime solution to the economic problem. Sylvia, a Mademoiselle Fiction Contest winner in '52 and a Mlle Guest Editor in '53, is today married to fellow poet, Ted Hughes. Sylvia and Ted are far from typical in their talent or in terms of the poetic success that each has already achieved.

Ted Hughes's book The Hawk in the Rain won the First Publication Award of the Poetry Center of New York's YM and YWHA in conjunction with Harper and Brothers in '57 and his verses have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, the Atlantic and Harper's Magazine, proof that the twenty-eight-year-old Yorkshireman's talents have not been overlooked. Sylvia, whose poems have appeared in Mlle., Harper's and the Atlantic before her marriage, has recently been published in the New Yorker, the Nation, and London Magazine. She won Poetry magazine's Bess Hopkin Prize in 1957. The couple met while Sylvia was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright in 1956; last year Ted taught creative writing at University of Massachusettsm while Sylvia, back at Smith, her alma mater, taught freshman English. Summing up their teaching experience, Sylvia says "Ted and I had similar reactions. It was exciting and rewarding to introduce students to writers one particularly enjoys, to stimulate discussions and to watch students develop, but it takes time and energy. Too much, we found, to be able to work at length on any writing of our own." This year the Hugheses are taking off--to live and write in Boston for at least twelve months anyway. Most of the problems of being married to another poet turn out to be advantages, it seems. "The bonuses of any marriage--shared interests, projects, encouragement and creative criticism--are all intensified. Both of us want to write as much as possible and we do. Ted likes a table he made in a window niche from two planks, and I have a fetish about my grandmother's desk with an ivy and grape design burned into the wood. In the morning we have coffee (a concession to England). That's about the extent of our differences. We do criticize each other's work, but we write poems that are as distinct and different as our fingerprints themselves must be." Bearing out Sylvia's statement are their contrasting poems on pages 34-5.

When a poet gets up and defends poetry "as the only night club where anything ever happens" he is taking on all comers. Howard Hart, a young lyric poet, has announced this in theatres and night clubs from here to San Francisco. Not beat or really very Bohemian when you meet him, Hart believes that "the greatest poem ever written was spoken" and quotes Pound to the effect that poetry has never been divorced from music except in its most decadent periods. Hart started learning to play the drums when he was eleven and "thought only in terms of the rhythm until I was seventeen." One of the most talented poets to come out of the poetry-jazz group, he was born on Cincinnati, Ohio, thrown out of "too many schools, learned about myself in Paris" and finally received an M.A. in Philosophy from Columbia in '52. His translation-adaptation of an Italian play, The Trial of Jesus, comes to an off-Broadway playhouse this winter, and his adaptation of Claudel's A Piece of Noon will probably reach Broadway soon. "I did the Claudel because it was more my play than the play I could have written at the time," Hart who is a neo-Thomist, explains. In a theatre he finds a kind of dramatic reality that he believes in invaluable for the lyric poet, and points out that drama is a traditional outlet among poets--Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas. Hart, however, carries this theatrical tradition one step further by reciting his poetry to jazz on the stage of New York's St. Mark's Playhouse--"wherever people will listen and the music is good. I've thought about trying for a teaching job, but somehow I'm beginning to make it this way... People are starting to hear the sound of poetry the way they do jazz--and, you know, even swing to it a little." Right now Hart is plotting an original verse play, The Bird on Ice, and working toward a new reading.

Kathleen Fraser, the youngest of our four poets, is only twenty-two and "still learning my craft." A graduate of Occidental College in California, she started writing serious poetry in her junior year and came to New York last March. When we were about to pay for the poems she'd sent us from California, we discovered that Kathy herself joined Mlle's Reader's Department and was beginning to feel at home in New York. "I came here because I wanted to be around other writers--people at my own point of writing whom I could learn from. New York is where things happen--are being created." After living through a period of loving the city and then hating it, she now finds "I'm afraid it's getting hold of me, and I'm here to stay. But I miss the ocean..." Winter Beach captures something of what the ocean means to her:

Along the winter beach, along the frozen edge
of the land where waves rave in peaks,
Under the white ice birds'
dipping to the sea's hunger,
The faces of once alive desirers stretch
in the shells of gray wood,
skeletons catching the wind in their bone hands;
and soft, round sand women lie silent,
waiting to be touched.
Their bodies are tired of fighting, they
Now form the contours of the land and absorb
The slow shivering sobs of winter waves.

In California the ocean was part of Kathy's daily life. "Now I go for long walks along the Hudson River." But she's looking forward to her family's visit here, "My family's a very important part of me, she explains. Kathy, a minister's daughter, is one of four children---"two of whom are already poets," she says. "But everyone writes, and we put out a family newspaper for our friends ar Christmas."

At Mlle., Kathy now works in the Fashion Copy Department learning a new aspect of writing--fashion. "It's difficult, a sort of word discipline"--and Kathy's a believer in discipline, particularly when it comes to poetry.

Part of learning her craft right now includes studying at the YMHA under Stanley Kunitz. This past summer she spent a week of her vacations at a poet's conference, working under John Ciardi. "I hope I've learned a little and that my poetry is beginning to show some awareness of the possibilities of form and structural patterns."

These four poets are among the most talented of the growing number of "impractical," stubborn young men and women who believe that poetry is important. All four are alike in their dedication to their talent and in their willingness to serve the fanciful and fickle White Goddess--for the reader's rich reward.